Home icon. The Works of Robert Graves. Exhibition: 1 April to 17 June 2011.

Cabinet 10: Laura Riding


Anarchism is not enough.

Laura Riding, Anarchism is not enough. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928.

‘There is a weakling music and a weakling poetry which flatter each other by making critical comparisons with each other…’

So writes Riding in her pungent, no-nonsense manifesto, Anarchism is not enough, a book about the relationships between the individual and literature and art to society. It is radical; it is difficult, as she was.

In 1929, Riding threw herself out of a window. It is generally agreed that this failed suicide-attempt was a major cause of the break-up of Graves’s first marriage with his wife, Nancy. Riding and Graves would part company in 1939.

This is the first American edition of 1928.